The importance of digital analytics

- Marketing is all about persuasion. You're working to convince someone to buy, and the more data you have at your fingertips, well, the better you'll be at persuading them to make that purchase. With most of our life lived out in a digital medium, well, there's a billion data points out there. Every action we take, from visiting a website to swiping our credit card at a retailer, is tracked. Digital analytics platforms like Google Analytics give us a way to make sense of all of this data, taking a tangle of digital fingerprints and turning them into a narrative that lets us quickly take actions that benefit our business goals. When you roll out a platform like Google Analytics, you're able to build a complete picture of how consumers are interacting with your website, likely, one of the most important pieces of your digital real estate. You'll see exactly how customers are interacting with your site, what pages they spend the most time on, or which pages they visited, but never took any action. You can see how many new customers you've gained through every digital channel, such as a blog that mentioned you, ads you're running or social media postings. You'll be able to track how that number changes over time and in response to changes in your marketing efforts. When you know what content is working and what channels are the most successful at bringing in new customers, well, you can allocate more resources to them. And if you're selling online, Google Analytics lets you dig deeply into shopping activity, quickly see which products are the most popular, generate the most sales and even those that support the most repeat purchases. You can also start to answer important questions about why your goals might be falling short. Perhaps there's a step in your checkout process that has a lot of friction, or maybe there are steps that are skipped altogether or an issue with performance for visitors using a particular mobile device. And if you found groups of users who haven't completed a step on your site, well, you can work to bring them back. Digital analytics lets you answer the important questions and map trends and patterns over time. It's a must-have for any business owner or marketer.